Building eCommerce

Catchy title isn’t it? I think I’m going to have to work on the article titles - maybe I should have called it “How to get 5000 links in 30 days.” Except that I can’t really tell exactly how many actual links the article submissions have produced. First here’s an excerpt from the article and the link to it:

Building Websites with Articles

Now everybody knows that writing articles is a powerful technique. You knew that, right? And everybody is writing articles, right? No. Did I? Not until recently, though I wrote a lot in blogs and did post some articles I wrote on my sites. There’s two parts to this for me. Writing, which I have been doing. Distributing. Which I hadn’t been doing.

I finally came out of that fog and decided that I had to see what distribution might really do. Content, such as original articles is still the basic currency of the internet. People come onto the web looking for information. Content provides that information.

But, if the content is just sitting on a blog or posted in an article directory on one website, it has very limited exposure without links. Content may be the flesh of the web, but links are the bones…

The article has the latest figure - from today - on how many pages are showing up in Yahoo, Google and MSN for each of the articles. It’s pretty amazing and it is something that obviously is a serious and powerful terchnique.

There’s been a lot of buzz around lately about Jason Potash’s latest release - I must have gotten 15 or 20 emails about it. Rather than just the latest, extreme upgrade to his earlier EzineAnnouncer software, he’s also doing a full dump of all his experience and techniques for everything from writing articles to all the lesser known tricks and techniques for ensuring optimum distribution and the greatest possible benefits from each article. My take on his material is that he has done a great job in providing everything you need to do really well using articles. If you haven’t already gotten ArticleAnnouncer, you might want to check it out and give it some serious consideration. There is nothing I know of that has worked, works now and will continue work as well as article submission - no, it isn’t an instant road to incredible wealth but I think we’ve all realized that there is no such thing unless you inherit.

Click here to check it out: Article Announcer

My own experiment with article submission is no longer an experiment, now it’s part of my marketing and website building routine. The results I’ve seen in a very short period have convinced me that I was pretty dumb not to have started doing this long ago. I don’t plan to waste any more time.

Here’s some preliminary data on the results of publishing articles:

This is based just on pages showing up (today 6/24/2005) in Google that reference the 3 articles on Building eCommerce Websites that Work.

Part 1: 384 pages. Published May 19th.

Part 2: 250 pages. Published June 1st.

Part 3: 912 pages. Published June 14th

I’m a little baffled by the last piece of data since that’s very new, just 10 days. I’m assuming that’s a spike caused by it appearing on dynamic pages and that it will most likely drop in the next two weeks or so. Over time I expect the numbers to increase as links stabilize and distribution continues.

That’s over 1500 pages, just in Google, in essentially one month. Now, some of those pages have no active link. They all should, but not everybody follows the rules and I made a mistake in the original resource box by not putting in a URL. However, even with a URL, some people scrape and don’t make the links active. That’s a violation of the TOS for using the article and therefore a copyright infringement and they are subject to legal action, but generally it’s not worth the trouble and the type of site that does that is of marginal value anyway. Most honest publishers follow the rules. And people with good sites nearly always do. In some cases it’s a mistake or the result of the tool used to add the article. Still links should be live no matter how someone adds an article.

Other live links will be on pages with low or no page rank, or on pages that don’t pass page rank. The former is just how it is, the latter is a borderline tactic. However, even a link that doesn’t pass rank can bring you traffic.

Some of the links may be on pages with high page rank. It varies, depending on the site. Certainly it looks to me like an excellent method to promote whatever you’re doing. Of course, we all “know” that publishing articles is an excellent method — but do you do it? I’ve just started and I can see real substantial results. Sometimes it’s hard for us to translate what we “know” - what everybody “knows”, into action. Try it yourself. Then you can look at your own results and decide whether this is something that you HAVE to add to your site promotion arsenal.

I think you’ll find that it’s well worth your time. And I’ll add a plug here for SubmitYourArticle.com. They have a great article submission service at an extremely reasonable price and their support is superb. And no, that’s not an affiliate link. I don’t get anything out of this except the pleasure of letting other people know about a really excellent service that I value and that really works for you. If you are going to write and publish articles, I strongly suggest you check them out and see what they’ll do for you.

Content is still what it’s all about.